One Region Forward Community Congress Workshops: This Week

This week, “One Region Forward” will be holding a series of workshops, soliciting public input regarding planning for a sustainable future for Buffalo and western New York.

One Region Forward is working to create a long-term vision for making Buffalo Niagara a more sustainable and equitable region by helping inform decisions on how we use our land, coordinate housing and transportation decisions, prepare for climate change and grow and distribute food locally.

Community engagement is critical to this initiative, and One Region Forward has stressed the importance of one-on-one interactions by traveling across the region this year to hear how Buffalo Niagara residents view sustainability in their lives (a full list of engagements to date can be viewed here).

Starting tonight and continuing on through Saturday the 16th, One Region Forward will be hosting fiveCommunity Congress Workshopsacross the region. These workshops will involve a hands-on mapping exercise where small groups of people will be asked to work together to map what they think the future of Buffalo Niagara should look like while answering questions like: How will we get around? Where will we live? Where will we work? Where will our food come from? What will we protect?

I’m going to take a guess here………judging by your name I will go out on a limb and say that you probably have not lived in Buffalo for over 55 years as I have Mr Naji. Study up buddy…Buffalo has been on the skids for over 40 years and it has been well documented….without radical change to the systemic issues that plague our city and many others for that fact, the result will be unavoidable and I have seen nothing in the last 25 years or so that would lead me to believe otherwise….makes a lot of SENSE…….

And UncleBluck, judging from your name, I will go out on a limb and say you have a silly name. But why the profiling? Incidentally, Arabs have lived in WNY (Maronite Christians from Syria/Lebanon, Yemeni Muslims) for a long, long time–more than 55 years even!

Anyway, back to the posting. Would it be terribly rude to ask just who “One Region Forward” is? It’s a cool name and all, but who are they, exactly? Who’s paying for the webpage? Then let’s talk. The Steering Committee seems to consist of “R. Shibley,” “B Roberts,” “D. Cotton,” and “H. Morse.” “Key Partners” include the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, the Buffalo-Niagara Medical Campus, and other usual suspects.

So, Bedenko. After posting an article last round blaming those who put on the event for not personally telling you about it – did you bother to show up this time and get involved in an effort (regionalism/sustainability) that you claimed to care so deeply about? Would love to hear what you thought.

I was unable to attend last week’s meetings because of a work commitment out of town.

Thank you also for your blatant hostility. I never blamed “those who put on the event for not personally telling [me] about it”. Quite the contrary, after blaming myself for not having seen the pieces about it in Buffalo Rising and the Buffalo News, what I wrote was:

It was, however, well-attended, so that’s why I’m so surprised. One way the effort could have gotten the word out would have been to follow lots of people on Twitter – the moment you get followed by a local regionalism congress, chances are you’d check it out. Instead, as of this morning, it’s following 39 people. On Facebook, it has a paltry 208 followers. That’s a crappy job getting the word out, if you ask me. Given that we have more marketing, PR, and social media experts per capita than we deserve, this is amazing to me.

I first learned of it via social media, and I get a lot of information about local goings-on through Twitter and Facebook. It helps to get that information before-the-fact, rather than after. Someone from the ECHDC confirmed for me that they had no idea it was going on, so I wasn’t the only one.

To that end, even though I was unable to attend, I thought it important to write the post shown above to alert people who might want to attend that these events were taking place. The more outreach and information, the better. I’m sorry this was offensive to you to the point of hostility.

As for what I “think”, I’ve written tons about regionalism to the point of redundancy, and I don’t necessarily believe that my attendance at a crowdsourcing event would be particularly productive or meaningful. But at least I knew about this round and could have made arrangements to attend if I was in town.